1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to the provision of automated conferencing to telecommunication conference group participants, and particularly mobile telephone subscribers.
2. Description of Prior Art
Traditionally, conference calls are scheduled in advance with required participants and a conference provider. The conference provider typically requires the originator of the conference to specify in advance a time slot and the number of conference ports to be utilized (based on which the conference originator is charged appropriately for the conference call). The conference provider provides a toll free number (and possibly an identification code) that the participants use to dial in at the start time to join and participate in the conference call. These pre-arranged conference calls are thus characterized by:    (i) Each participant's pre-commitment;    (ii) Participant dial-in to participate; and    (iii) Conference calls which are of relatively long duration.
An alternative to the traditional pre-arranged conference call approach has evolved that is based on the concept of unscheduled or instant group conferencing. According to this approach, a conference originator requests a conference provider to arrange an instant conference among a group of participants. The conference provider's system dials out to each participant in order to invite them to the conference. All participants who are willing and able to participate in the conference call can answer the call and join the conference. These instant group conference calls are typically characterized by:    (i) Participant commitment by answering the conference call;    (ii) Conference invitations by dialing out to the participants; and    (iii) Conference calls that are of relatively short duration.
A problem inherent in the instant group conferencing model is that a required participant may not be able to commit to the conference invitation at the moment when the system initiates the conference call. This may be due to many reasons, such as the participant being temporarily away from the telephone, tied up with some urgent work, etc., at the moment when the participant is called. In this situation, the conference call will not be able to include the required participant and may thus be canceled, causing unnecessary intrusion for the remaining participants who are waiting on the call for others to answer. Even if the conference call is not canceled, it may not be effective due to the absence of the required participant who declined the call.
Some instant group conferencing systems, such as those based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), use text message-based invitations that can invite participants to the conference call while provide context information about the conference. However, the invitations generally do not provide the participants enough advance information, such as who the other participants are, what the topic is, etc., to enable the participants to make a truly informed decision about whether to accept or decline the conference invitation at the time it is received. In addition, the acceptance of an invitation is final and there is no way for the participants to temporarily change their availability status in order to perform other tasks waiting for the conference to be established.
One proposed solution to the problems associated with instant group conferencing is for a conference originator to obtain individually from each of the participants their short-term commitment to participate in the conference before actually initiating the conference call. However, there may be situations where a participant's willingness to commit to the conference call changes over the short time period in which the individual commitments are being gathered, or at any time prior to the conference call. This may require the originator and the participants to spend a lot of time engaged in one-to-one communication to ensure that all the participants are committed to participate in the conference call, thus reducing the effectiveness of instant group conferencing.
One other existing approach to effective instant group conferencing requires participants to publish on an ongoing basis their availability to receive a voice call from the conference originator. The conference originator then initiates the conference call at the moment when all required participants publish themselves to be available to the originator. There are two issues with this approach. One is that it may be difficult for the participants to update their availability indicators so as to accurately reflect their current state. Hence, they may still not be able to commit to the conference call at the moment of receiving an invitation. Second, a participant may want to know who the other participants are before committing to the conference call and may only commit when a certain set of participants are included (or excluded).
Accordingly, there is presently a need for an alternative approach to instant group conferencing that is more effective than the above-mentioned solutions.